Historicising 'craft' In The Teaching Of Fiction

摘要

This essay argues that creative writing pedagogy relies upon a dehistoricised approach to the notion of 'craft' in which the formal elements of fiction, such as voice and point of view (POV), are conceptualised as static and unchanging 'building blocks' for writers. Illustrative samples of writing are thus understood synchronically, disavowing the historical contingency and mutabiltity of formal categories. The essay argues that a diachronic approach to the teaching of craft will enable formal elements of fiction to be used as heuristic devices for historicising writing samples, thus opening up possibilities for refining and adapting these elements to the concerns of contemporary writers. As a case study, the essay analyses the way in which handbooks produced by teachers of creative writing adopt a 'pros' and 'con's' approach to the use of narrative voice. This approach, in the guise of 'practical advice', perpetuates a modernist aesthetic prejudice for impersonal modes of narration. The essay will draw attention to new modes of omniscient narration being developed in contemporary fiction which complicate this approach to the teaching of narrative voice.